Pat Buchanan is off his rocker again. In “Unpardonable
sin of Larry Summers,” he’s confusing different aptitudes
for different levels of intelligence. Apparently someone who is
good at math and science but not so good at English or history,
or perhaps your stereotypical geek/nerd who cannot handle social
situations is more intelligent than those less skilled at math
and science but more skilled in other areas. So apparently your
autistic savant is among the most intelligent people out there.
He also opens the door to the very thing that the movie “Gatica”
depicts, he writes “Can it be that biology is destiny?” While I
do not think that he would go so far as “Gatica” does, I think it
is incredibly dangerous to be opening the door to allowing society
to expect differing levels of ability and achievement for different
segments of the population. Rather, I still believe that equality
will only ever come when the differences cease to be noticed.
I believe that you will not achieve racial harmony while having
different races, that it can only come in a color-blind society.
Again, I am speaking of ideals, but this time perhaps an obtainable
one, for already we see any number of interracial marriages blurring
the lines between the races, if we were to require racial blindness
in our colleges and applications process, i.e. refuse to allow it
to be on the forms, get rid of the quotas and instead simply insist
on the most qualified being accepted, I think you’d go farther
over time. You might see some stratification, perhaps in part
because of the sort of aptitude that Mr. Buchanan refers to, but
also because some groups self-discriminate against achieving in a
meritocracy. Boundless
had an article on this a few years back, “Defending
The Race,” which has some interesting numbers. For example,
“the children of black parents who earn $50,000 a year on average
post lower SAT scores than white students whose parents earn just
$10,000.” This, and other numbers in this article, largely come
from Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America
by John McWhorter, a Professor of Linguistics at UC, Berkeley.
I would suggest you look at the Boundless article at very least
before getting on my case too much on this topic.
Returning to my original thrust, while you might see some
stratification, the demonstrable existence of a meritocracy would
have its own effects, it would tend to undermine the types of
self-discrimination that lead to my tangent above. It would tend
to allow the exceptional individuals that through hard work or
genetic “luck,” go beyond the “tendencies” of their race or sex
to in fact do so. It would not, of course, be easy to monitor
or ensure in practice. Unlike a quota system, which nice easy
statistical results that lend themselves to government oversight,
a meritocracy is much harder to evaluate and regulate. After all,
at times you have equally qualified candidates but can only hire one.
At other times the ability to define on paper what constitutes
the most qualified candidate can be difficult. Take for example
the true story that the movie “The Sixth Happiness” tells, of
a lower class English woman determined to be a missionary, and
who was in fact a successful one by any meaningful definition.
Yet she was unqualified for the position according to the China
missionary society. Their rules were too strict to allow for
exceptional people, obviously an undesirable situation as well.
Where does the balance lay? I am unsure, I just know that quotas
and the unreasoning drive for “diversity” is not it.
